IGShell - IGLib's Shell Application

This page contains IGLib binaries and IGShell, a simple shell application that is based on the library.

Contents:

About the Software

Documentation
Download
Archive

About the Software

IGShell is an extensible application based on the Investigative Generic Library (IGLib) and the .NET framework. It provides access to a couple of useful utilities implemented in IGLib through a command-line interpreter used to invoke those utilities. Beside immediate applicability of some tools like a flexible expression evaluator or an extensive set of cryptographic utilities, it provides access to some demonstrative examples showing the capabilities of the library (such as 2D and 3D graphics).

Furthermore, it provides an application framework for building flexible and extensible desktop applications that can cover practically unlimited areas of application. The framework is conceived to support rapid development of multifunctional applications, where full industrial scale applications can be developed in the same framework as a number of accompanying testing applications (where a solid set of tests can be maintained for the current functionality of software) and sandbox applications that are created simultaneously to provide proof of concepts.

Flexibility that enables hosting so different components under one roof is provided through the three level interpretation system, which enables easy combining and launch of the desired functions from a potentially very large set of available ones. On the case of cryptographic utilities, the software projects available in this distribution demonstrates the flexibility of this concept to combine functionality implemented in the underlying libraries and provide it through applications in a user friendly way. Here, IGLib provides the functionality itself (but this can be extended by arbitrary number of external libraries), and at the same time it provides all the necessary machinery for construction of the application framework (such as interpreters or interprocess communication tools).

Functionality

Applications

A Visual Studio (or MonoDevelop) project for building the IGShell is included in order to demonstrate how to build a simple shell application based on IGLib. This project can be used as a template for building your own shell applications, which can be more complex and provide more functionality.

In addition, two hosted applications are included, namely the HashForm and the HashShell. These are simple but useful applications for calculation of

Examples

A number of example files that contain various commands for the shell are available in the examples directory (zipped version for download). This directory also contains some sample files on which example commands act. For example, the examples/crypto/excrypto.cmd (view html version here) is a command file that contains numerous examples of how to uses built-in cryptographic utilities of the IGShell, and the containing directory examples/crypto/ contains some auxiliary files (especially in the examples/crypto/cryptofiles/ directory) that are used when example commands are run (e.g. to test how these files are encrypted and then decrypted).

Documentation

ReadMe file. Contains very basic information about the software.

License Agreement. Contains terms of use of the software.

IGLib Documentation.

See also:

IGLib home page. Contains information on the Investigative Generic Library, the code base for this software, including the complete code documentation (and wider code documentation).
My other documentation.
Documentation section on the page about my work at COBIK where I use IGLib as a base library for research software in the field of neural networks.
Docuentation section on the IOptLib page.
Collection of optimization-related links.
Ph.D. thesis on optimization shell Inverse.

Download

Download the files (click on the link).

Short installation instructions:

Download the compressed archive by clicking on the download link above.
Extract contents of the archive to an arbitrary directory.
Run the executable from the location where files were unpacked. As executable is build around a command-line interpreter, things are invoked by providing commands and their arguments as arguments to the program that is run in a console. Some examples of commands with arguments are in the .cmd file that is contained in the root directory.
Within the root directory, there is a Visual Studio C# project that can be used to build the application. You can modify the application and run it from the VS IDE or from MonoDevelop.